This Is Osaka

One of the cliched shots that is iconic of Osaka. This is one part of Dotonbori, which literally means, Field of A Thousand Deep Fryers Where The Clean Arteries Come to Explode (Anal Fact-Checkers will say it literally means Doton's Canal, but they aren't taking Context into account).

If you ate at different Dotonbori restaurants everyday for your entire adult life, you wouldn't be able to eat at them all. Because you would be dead before you turned 30. If that's not a proverb it should be. There is one that run's something like, In Kyoto the rich become poor by spending their fortunes on clothes, but in Osaka they become poor by spending their fortunes on food.

This is from the Ebisu bridge which crosses the canal, where in 1985 after the Hanshin Tigers won the Japan Series of Baseball, the revelers, jumping celebratory into the Canal, grabbed a statue of Colonel Sanders in effigy of player Randy Bass (because you know... he was a foreigner, and a statue of Colonel Sanders resembles him more than anyone else in the crowd would) and chucked it into the canal. Thus began the Curse of the Colonel, (Boston's cursed by a fat guy who smoked stogies, Osaka by a fake colonel who smoked chickens. Better than being cursed by a billy goat.), the Tigers have remained without a championship win since '85 and efforts to recover the statue from the canal (either by divers or dredging) have all failed. Y'know, because it's a canal, in the middle of a giant urban industrial city, it'd be easier to find a one yen coin in a large stock pot filled with split pea soup. Y'know, because you can eat the soup. That canal ain't clean even by East River NYC standards.

@pakismo, nah, it was up for a few months by the time I got to Japan, but I don't think I would go in regardless, I might come out with a few diseases. Oh and thanks for the invite.

@cap'n, which is exactly why they are cursed.

@cole, I really dig Tokyo, awesome place, lots to do, but I prefer the Kansai area and Osaka. I don't know what it is, maybe it's somethingi n the water, or the funny way the people talk.

@Haikiba, yeah I feel ashamed for forgetting that one, my long time roommate was from Philadelphia, so around playoff time (didn't matter which sport) it would come up n conversation a lot. Don't the Pirates have some curse on them too?

yes, it is, people watching alone could take up an entire night. I was reminded in a nother photo that after taking this shot I ran into a group of about 30-40 hosts all hanging around on the outside and halfway inside of the Starbucks/Tsutaya which is out of frame down past the bottom left of this shot. I don't think I had ever seen that many of them in one place before and was so in awe I could not take one of those stealthy unethical shots.